Grit Lab Report

Hi Nancy,

Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!

We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.

We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.

Important note!

Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.

If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.

Okay, let’s get started!

The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.

We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.

Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.

The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.

Regarding passion you picked Stage 4: I have an interest I’m actively pursuing, voluntarily devoting more than 3 hours of “free time” each week .

Regarding perseverance you picked .

As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.

Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.

In week 2, we looked at your interests.

Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.

Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.

Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.

In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.

You said your top three values were stimulation, self-direction, and achievement.

You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.

When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was emotional stability.

You said your top three talents were artistic / spatial, kinesthetic, and analytic.

We then talked about goal hierarchies.

You said you had a general intuition (but nothing specific yet) about your top-level goal.

We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.

A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to running an ultra .

Here is how self-concordant that goal was:

Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.

It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!

Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.

We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:

Work Smart

In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.

You WOOPed!

For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said eat better .

For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said Feel amped .

For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said Immediate dopamine .

For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When I feel hungry, I’ll eat a real meal .

Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.

And here’s how much you learned

These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.

The important thing is that you learn something along the way!

In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.

You shared you’ve done daily practice in Dental hygiene .

We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.

In week 8, we discussed feedback.

Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!

You said you felt Unsuccessful when receiving critical feedback, and Unsuccessful when receiving positive feedback.

We then turned to learning about stress.

In week 9, you reported feeling nearly an extreme amount of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being myself… .

We also talked about adversity and failure.

Although related, adversity and failure are different:

Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.

However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…

Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.

And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.

We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.

Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.

You describe the habit you chose as Health .

Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.

Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?

So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.

In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.

Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.

Here’s how you described them:

You also wrote a gratitude letter to Other .

In one word, you said it made you feel Good .

One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.

… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.

Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.

Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?

Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.

Grit is perseverance *&* passion
Interest inspires learning
Talent is the rate at which you learn.
Goal hierarchy
Goals bridge the intention-action gap.
Flow is earned via deliberate practice.
Ask for advice rather than feedback
Learn from failure
Relationships are key
How to be sustainable giver

In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.

Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:

Vanessa Frigon
Thank you for being such a great teammate this semester. I truly enjoyed getting to know you more, and I appreciate all of the insights and experiences that you brought to our group. I think you have a very cool perspective about life, especially given your love of nature. You are very reflective and self-aware, which I really enjoyed seeing throughout this class. You are also very kind and have such a great spirit, and I appreciate that you always put in an effort to hear about our days before we dove into group conversations. I really enjoyed your Discovery Project, and I think your goals are very admirable. It requires a lot of self-discipline and mental fortitude to walk for 50 miles and for days on end, and I think you're so cool for being able to do this. You have made me realize that the seemingly impossible is truly possible because before you, I have never met an ultra-marathoner. I think it is awesome that you like to see the world and do such daring things outdoors.
Tapiwa Chikwanda
Nancy is humble, kind-hearted, and gritty. It is her first semester back since taking a break and she hasn’t let that stop her from getting involved. I have enjoyed hearing about her experiences out on the water or in the mountains. She reflects on both life-threatening events and day-to-day life with a light hearted attitude. It’s striking how she manages to stay down to earth with all the adventurous feats she has accomplished. I appreciate how readily she volunteers her time - whether that be through cleaning up a park for the community, or through offering a listening ear to a friend. I have also enjoyed hearing how she uncovered her aspiration to serve the wounded as an EMT, and I wish her well in making that a reality. Her discovery project was about ultramarathon running. I wasn’t aware of the distinction between standard 26.2 mile marathons and ‘ultras’ which extend well beyond that distance. I also learned that extreme distances demand a completely different mindset and training approach, where completion is more important than speed. It was interesting to see how Nancy went from disliking running to planning a 50-kilometer soon. To turn a grueling activity into an enjoyable social event, she has involved friends and family, along with listening to podcasts during the runs.

We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.

Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?

Drumroll please…

Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.

In any case, grit is not built in a day…

…remember that progress is never smooth…

…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.

With grit and gratitude,

Angela and the Grit Lab team.